Terry Glavin

The staff of Charlie Hebdo didn't have it coming. It wasn't western imperialism or "blowback" or American impudence or inattention to the allegedly delicate feelings of Muslims that killed those people in Paris.

While it's true that Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East criticizes Israel's laws and policies, it does so out of a yearning for a just and lasting peace in Israel and Palestine, not out of any ill-feelings toward Israelis, writes Tyler Levitan, Ottawa, Campaigns Coordinator for Independent Jewish Voices — Canada.

It is more than fair to criticize the NDP for failing to articulate a coherent, progressive posture that is sufficiently distinguishable from the positions of the Conservative and Liberal parties. But that criticism should be tempered by the distance Mulcair is going to have to go to extricate the party from the damage done by disingenuous “pro-Palestinian” histrionics that have been dragging the party through muck for so long that it's almost impossible to remember when it was otherwise.

It is moving testimony to the statesmanship and generosity of both of Afghanistan's leading presidential contenders that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been allowed to take credit for having pulled Afghanistan back from the abyss.

Just when it seemed certain that Afghan democracy had survived Hamid Karzai's various sinister manouevres, just at the very moment when Afghanistan's national leadership was poised to be at last finally shut of warlordism, cronyism, and corruption, the whole thing has spun out of control. The country is again at the precipice of state collapse and civil war,.

It was the worst possible denouement to Israel's intense national vigil for those three Yeshiva students kidnapped on June 12 at the Kfar Etzion settlement south of Jerusalem. On Monday, under a pile of rocks on a hill above Hebron, searchers came upon the corpses of Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16.

It's now a fairly safe bet that by the October 2015 federal election, it will be fairly obvious that there has been an elaborate shell game going on involving Alberta's oilsands, a bewildering array of pipeline megaprojects, and the post-Kyoto climate commitments Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to keep under something called the Copenhagen Accord. It should not come as a surprise if by voting day, it will have occurred to quite a few Canadians that all along, in all these matters, they have been taken for chumps.

It's quite the contrast: ritual beheadings and jihadist firing squads erupting all across Iraq at the same time that millions of voters in Afghanistan were calmly defying Taliban suicide-bomb threats and queueing for a second-round runoff vote to replace that ill-tempered old nabob, Hamid Karzai.